How drawing helped me stay sober

Older viewers/readers may be familiar with this story, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it while actually doing the thing that I was talking about in the story!

Others will have seen the “finished product” but not necessarily see how it emerges.

This is in the “extended voicemail” format where the narrative wiggles around as much as the lines I’m drawing 🙂

I was vlogging before you were born

I dug into an old backup drive at the weekend and found this. I’ve been looking for it for ages.

It’s the very first piece of video that I made and shared via the internet. This was August 2005, 8 months after I’d started podcasting in a similarly impulsive, unplanned and amateurish way (three adjectives that have defined my career ever since!)

We’d heard of YouTube by this time, but I don’t think it was available in the UK so this was originally at libsyn.com where I was hosting my podcasts (audio blogs) – I can see I used a thumbnail of me gurning in the original blog post that linked to it.

Within a couple of months I had my first (unpaid) promotional vlog series for a line of men’s grooming products. So yes, I happily describe myself as an (if not ‘the’!) OG beauty vlogger.

I finally joined YouTube in March 2006, by which time I was regularly collaborating with Debbie Davies on our (too) short-lived series “All This And Brains Too” so my first video on YT was “Desperately Seeking Harvey”.

I’ve made a playlist of all the vlogging and vlog-like content I’ve got. I find it annoying that I can’t seem to edit the metadata so that things will show up in the order they were created rather than when they were uploaded. But that might just be me being old.

If you’re silly enough to try bingeing that vlog playlist, do let me know how far you got before your brain melted.

Friday’s Trip to Guildford

I’m trudging across the gap between my aspiration and my ability to fulfil it. Too much b-roll, not enough meat. Never mind. I’ve managed to get the red nose treatment on the thumbnail here.

It’s all helping me to see what I need to work on more. And in the meantime, I’m lucky enough to have work work to do. More fun again soon.

Walking The Streets Again

Another day, another videoblog.

I went up to London for a couple of meetings and remembered how tiring it can be to just exist sometimes. It was nice though to hang around the West End without the tension I used to feel that I ought to be somewhere else doing something else.

Fun to see my subscriber count going up on YouTube after a long flat line for so long. I’m making a determined effort not to look at any other stats though, just post these things and get on with life.